Book Review
For decades, Western media have been narrating the same story about China being this brutal "dictatorship" whose people are killed at the hands of the criminal communist regime, giving the Tiananmen Square massacre as a prime example of the brutality of the Chinese government, wherein supposedly scores of students were killed at the hands of the People's Liberation Army. However, a new book emerged proving that these claims are false and have no foundation to them except for Washington's aspirations to tarnish the image of the Chinese Communist Party.
Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, a new book by A. B. Abrams, highlights that there never were any killings in the infamous Tiananmen Square back in 1989 as had been spread by Western propaganda for decades, and it was revealed that the entire affair was but a mere attempt at showing China as the villain in the geopolitical arena. The book underlines that no killings, let alone a massacre as is proclaimed, took place in Tiananmen Square.
How did the US succeed in manipulating the mainstream narrative and have millions upon millions of people believe that China initiated a mass murder of its own people - young college students - crushing them with tanks and shooting them down with machine guns? The answer is simple: the manipulation of public perception through the press. This could be done using media out of context and providing an incomplete version of the truth.
For example, the most infamous piece of media "documenting" the crime to ever exist is a video showing a tank marching onto a person alleged to have been a student, and right as the tank gets close enough to the young man and stops, the video is cut, with there being some text accompanying the video hinting or proclaiming that the tank went on to run over the protester. However, that could not be further from the truth. In reality, other protesters rushed to the scene and accompanied him from there as the tank was standing in place waiting for him to comply and get out of its way.
The book argues that all the acts committed by the United States were in a bid to "justify wars of conquest and exploitation" and generate multi-billion-dollar profits for the notorious military-industrial complex, as reported by CovertAction Magazine.
Abrams highlighted that the Tiananmen Square protests initially took place not as a push for Westernization or the downfall of the Chinese government. Instead, their primary focus was on reinforcing the principles of China's 1949 Communist Revolution and addressing the issue of corrupt officials who had deviated from Maoist principles.
This movement encompassed not only students but also a significant number of workers, who exhibited a stronger anti-CCP stance. Their collective objective aimed at the establishment of a socialist democracy within the framework of the movement.
The book cited a cable from the US Embassy in Beijing that WikiLeaks published in 2016. The leak included reports on the eyewitness account of a Chilean diplomat and his wife who were present when the PLA made it to Tiananmen Square to disperse the protesters. The pair made it in and out of the square numerous times without any harassment and observed no mass firing of weapons into the crowds. They never saw any use of lethal force, to begin with.
Moreover, the book cited former Washington Post Beijing Bureau chief Jay Mathews who, in 1998, admitted that "all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully."
It also cited Reuters correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3-4 at the center of Tiananmen Square and reported that most of the students left the square peacefully with the remainder of them being persuaded to do the same.
As is customary, the main source the Western media used to claim that a massacre took place was an anonymous student from Qinghua University making claims to the Hong Kong press, who then made it to the British media.
Still, BBC's Beijing correspondent James Miles said there was no massacre. "Western reporting had conveyed the wrong impression and protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations."
The narrative was also completely spun out of proportion, with the perpetrators being painted as the victims of a crime that was never committed in the first place. The book underlined that those who did die in Beijing during the events lost their lives in street battles between the PLA and insurgents far from the square. Reports from the US Department of State underlined that the unarmed PLA officers were attacked with petrol bombs, burning many alive.
Uyghurs, another 'crime' China committed
The hoax built around Tiananmen Square was a blueprint for US media campaigns aimed at showing the Chinese government in a bad light, as Washington went on to accuse Beijing of perpetrating a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.
The book stressed that the claims about the so-called Uyghur genocide relied on nothing but hardline extremist US-funded anti-China groups. Namely, they were funded by the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy, which was tasked with carrying out what the notorious spy agency had done alone under the covers for decades.
Amid the claims of Beijing genociding the Uyghurs, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang saw an increase of 25% between 2010 and 2018 instead of the population experiencing a contraction. Even facilities the West claimed to have been "concentration camps" in which Uyghurs were killed en masse and "brainwashed" or "indoctrinated" appeared to have been a logistics park, a regular detention center, and elementary and middle schools.
Xinjiang looks good, safe, and secure, and all the people I spoke with seemed happy about it, former London Metropolitan Police Officer Jerry Grey, who spent a lot of time traveling in Xinjiang, said.
"Uyghurs in China have been growing faster than the majority Han Chinese in part because they weren't subject to the one-child policy, they have 20,000 mosques built [...] Uyghur children can get into top universities easier than Han Chinese, and have halal foods prepared for them in canteens and they have a prayer area on campus," Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian businessman and Chinese political analyst said.
"Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against the adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying [US imperial] actions," Abrams said in his book.
a repost from almayadeen
Addition notes:
1] Today, the U.S. government relies less on the CIA in most cases and more on the relatively transparent initiatives undertaken by such public and private organizations as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Freedom House, George Soros’s Open Society, and a network of other well-financed globetrotting public and private professional political organizations, primarily American, operating in the service of the state’s parallel neoliberal economic and political objectives. Allen Weinstein, who helped establish NED, noted: “A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
2] Damon Wilson is the President and CEO of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot that was founded in the 1980s to promote propaganda and support opposition figures in countries the U.S. targets for regime change, especially using “colour revolutions” in Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Hong Kong, Malaysia.
3] Joe Biden’s remarks during the second Democracy Summit whereby he pledged $690 million for foreign influence operations to “support democracy around the world” through funding free media outlets in Third World countries which NED is intensely involved.
4] NED has been known to fabricate atrocities, like those allegedly committed against the Uyghur, while falsely lionizing their allies—in order to whip up moral outrage and justify U.S. regime change by encirclement and military operations, (Liberation News).
5]
Related Readings
Workers World, 1989: Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
Richard Roth, There Was No "Tiananmen Square Massacre"
WikiLeaks, LATIN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF JUNE 3-4 EVENTS ON TIANANMEN SQUARE